Reporter Volume 25, No.18 February 24, 1994

By LOIS BAKER
News Bureau Staff
The University at Buffalo has received a $2.4 million federal grant to
establish the nation's first center charged with developing objective
standards to measure disability and its effects, and to assess the
effectiveness of rehabilitation programs designed to treat
disabilities and improve function. 
	The new Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on
Functional Assessment and Evaluation of Rehabilitation Outcomes will
fund seven research projects over the next four years. The work will
involve faculty from UB's Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and
its schools of nursing, health related professions and architecture
and planning.
	The new UB center  also will collaborate with five other
academic rehabilitation centers--Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.;
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago; Kessler Institute for
Rehabilitation Inc., West Orange, N.J.; The Ohio State University, and
Brown University.  D'Youville College in Buffalo will work with the UB
center to develop a curriculum in functional-assessment studies.
	"Our charge is to introduce a more scientific approach to
measuring the abilities and limitations of people living with
handicaps," said Glen E. Gresham, professor and chair of the UB
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and the grant's project
director.
	"We hope to develop uniform standards for measuring disability
and the methods disabled people use to adapt that everyone accepts and
understands."
	Currently, there is no system to classify disabilities
according to severity, or a standard rehabilitation regimen based on
severity, Gresham said. As the population ages and as the demand for
rehabilitation services increases, the need for an across-the-board
standard has become increasingly evident.
	"In this era of health-care reform," he noted, "the field of
rehabilitation medicine must be able to prove the value of its
services. Research conducted through this new center will enable us to
define disabilities clearly, tell which rehabilitation approaches are
most valuable, and will allow rehabilitation workers across the
country to use a  common language to describe patients and their
problems."
	The center's seven research projects and the academic
rehabilitation centers involved are:
	1. Handicap assessment--to improve the classification of
handicaps (UB and Craig Hospital).
	2. Relationship of treatment to outcomes--to determine how
much rehabilitation programs help patients (UB, Rehabilitation
Institute of Chicago and Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation).
	3. Measuring handicapping environments--to identify barriers
that produce handicaps and measure the extent of their effect (UB).  
	4. Characteristics of effective, efficient medical
rehabilitation programs--to determine why one program works better
than another ( UB, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Kessler
Institute for Rehabilitation).
	5. Determining which functional-assessment measure can best be
applied to persons with traumatic brain injury (UB and The Ohio State
University).
	6. Validity of telephone interview versus personal interview
for completing the Functional Independence Measure, or FIM, a score
used to follow a patient's progress and measure the outcomes of a
rehabilitation program (UB).
	7. Determining whether social support enhances rehabilitation
outcomes ( UB, Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation and Brown
University).
	The grant also calls for developing a curriculum in
functional-assessment studies, which will be offered initially by UB
and D'Youville College; writing a training manual on using functional
assessment instruments, and hosting a national conference on
functional assessment. The 1994 conference will be held in Washington,
D.C., in conjunction with the International Rehabilitation Medicine
Association's annual meeting.
	UB has been in the forefront of medical rehabilitation for the
past decade. UB researchers led a national effort to develop the
Uniform Data System for Medical Rehabilitation, which includes the
Functional Independence Measure (FIM), a standard now employed
nationally and internationally by facilities treating severely
disabled people to define a disabled person's ability to perform
common tasks.
	UB's Department of Rehabilitation Medicine also established a
national database, which currently holds more than 400,000 patient
records from rehabilitation programs in the U.S, Europe, Japan and
Australia.
	Byron Hamilton, UB clinical associate professor of
rehabilitation medicine,  is principal investigator on the grant.
Nadine Fisher, UB clinical assistant professor, is program
coordinator, and James A. Phillips, UB clinical instructor, is fiscal
manager.
	The  new research and training center will function within the
framework of the UB Center for Functional Assessment Research, which
is directed by Carl V. Granger, professor of rehabilitation medicine.